Is the Global Mind Real?

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http://www.scientificexploration.org/edgescience/edgescience_01.pdf

Is the Global Mind Real?
Roger D. Nelson

History changed course in late 2001, when the world watched in shock and horror as the World Trade Towers collapsed, destroyed by passenger planes turned into bombs by terrorists. It was a long moment of profound emotional sharing across the globe, with shock and fear turning to anguish
and ultimately to compassion. In the midst of the tragedy many of us could see signs of humanity
coming together as one. That was not to be, sadly. But for a moment, there was a powerful
convergence of thought and emotion across the world that registered clearly in data from the Global Consciousness Project. Maybe this scientific instrument also picked up our coherence, the signature of a global mind startled awake by the intense synchronized activity of our local minds.
Broadly shared responses to events are increasingly common because our communication networks spread the word instantly when disasters strike. The great earthquakes in Turkey and the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean created tragedies that we all saw. The internet and mobile phones and high speed travel are making the world accessible and interconnected in ways that are new, but not strange. Humans are social animals and we naturally congregate. Nowadays we gather in ever larger numbers, even though global distances may separate us physically. As the New Year arrives
in each time zone, we share the celebrations in Fiji, Hong Kong, Novosibirsk, London, New York, and share the anticipation of a singular midnight moment. The internet enables organized meditations that can bring a million people around the world into synchronized focus. And bad
news travels very fast in the 21st century. The Global Consciousness Project, or GCP, is
an international collaboration of scientists running an instrument designed to capture possible effects of shared consciousness, much in the way that laboratory experiments have shown effects of intention on sensitive electronic devices that generate random numbers. In the lab, a person tries to change the behavior of a Random Number Generator (or RNG, which is a physical device, not a computer program) to produce smaller or larger numbers—the equivalent of flipping a coin and getting an excess of heads—just by wishing or willing the change. The experiments show that human
intention can induce small, but significant changes in the output of an RNG. When we take the same instruments into the field, we find they also respond to special moments of group consciousness produced by shared experience in rituals and ceremonies, or inspired by great music or intense meetings of mind. The GCP instrument is a network of stations around the world where random data are collected. It uses the same technology as the lab and field experiments, and asks the natural question: Is there non-random structure in the data when great events occur? By implication we are asking whether the RNGs might capture evidence of a global consciousness, but it will It is our
duty—as men and women—to behave as though limits to our ability do not exist. We are collaborators in creation of the Universe.